“They are afraid of letting people loose; they fear that as soon as it pleases the single individual to behave as the single individual, the worst will happen. Furthermore, people think that existing as the single individual is the easiest thing of all, and that therefore people must be compelled to become the universal. I am unable to share either this fear or this opinion, and for the same reason.”
— Søren Kierkegaard
1If there’s any common value—in name only if nothing else—throughout the West, it is the freedom to be yourself. We have many words for its many facets: freedom, agency, autonomy, individuality, self-expression, empowerment, choice, etc. We argue on every level about how to protect and promote it: from tolerance, democracy, liberty, justice, law, to their opposites. I have my preferences, you have yours. Convictions, even. All are meaningless, vanity.
Sure, certain cultural and political environments are more tolerable than others. By no means am I saying you should or shouldn’t strive for your freedom or your neighbor’s freedom this way or that way. The mistake is this: what the world calls freedom is not what the Bible calls freedom.
To take our blinders off is to admit the biblical perspective is impossible to translate into language that computes for anyone who hasn’t already decided they’re willing to lose the whole world.
Let me be clear: no matter who we are or where we live or what we believe, to whatever extent our perspective makes sense to the world, we are not free.
Not free but a slave.2 Not alive but dead.3
When Christianity is palatable, it is false. When it is a reasonable, effective way of life that clearly benefits society at large, it is false. The Bible is never so. The Bible swings a sword right at the reader’s heart, and the only rational response is to parry. The way of freedom, the way of love, necessarily appears as something else in the Bible:
Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
— Luke 14:25-264
I opened with an excerpt from Kierkegaard criticizing the church’s response to these words from Jesus. The churchgoing among us, myself included, have heard a thousand times that “Jesus doesn’t actually mean hate here, he just means that you love God first and foremost such that everything else is second and last. ‘Hate’ here means ‘loves less, sets aside, does not honor, reckons as nothing.’” Sure, have your cake and eat it, too. But back up for a second: let it offend you. Get riled up. Don’t finagle with the text to feel better about yourself. Jesus says WHAT?!
Kierkegaard’s response to the verse is more honest:
If that pious and sentimental [Christian] thinks that he can smuggle Christianity into the world by haggling like this…he can succeed in convincing a person that this was the meaning of that passage, then it is to be hoped that at that same time he will also succeed in convincing that person that Christianity is one of the most pitiable things in the world. For…that teaching is certainly not worth the trouble of standing up for.
The words are terrifying, yet I certainly believe that one can understand them without necessarily following from this that the person who has understood them therefore has the courage to act accordingly. Still, a person must be honest enough to acknowledge what is written, to admit that it is something great, even though he does not himself have the courage to do it…
Now, it can readily be seen that if the passage is to mean anything, it must be understood literally. God is the one who demands absolute love. If, in demanding someone’s love, a person thinks that this must also be demonstrated by that person becoming indifferent to everything else that had been dear to him—then he is not only an egotist, but also stupid, and to the extent he staked his life on this love from the desired person, the one who demands this sort of love is simultaneously signing his own death warrant. Thus, a husband requires that his wife leave father and mother, but if he were to regard as proof of her extraordinary love for him that she became, for his sake, a lukewarm, apathetic, etc. daughter, then he is more stupid than the stupidest of people.5
There is a human example (other than Jesus) of this radical form of faith and discipleship: Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God. It cannot be rationalized or systematized. The world cannot accept it. It’s important for us—if we are to call ourselves followers of Christ—to accept that.6
This is a hard saying; who can listen to it? Jesus, knowing our grumbling, asks “Do you take offense at this?”7
Let me return to the original premise: nothing the world calls freedom is relevant to real freedom. All are slaves to false gods. All are dead and have earned that fate. All are hopelessly mired in the quicksand of a confused mass of people each trying to be a “self,” trying to direct their own fate, trying to live forever or make something that will. All are unable even to think for themselves—that most basic tenet of individuality is out of reach. And the only way out?
It’s not revolution or democracy; it’s not existentialism or nihilism; it’s not communal living or homesteading alone in Alaska; it’s not aligning with society or pursuing anything society recognizes as escape or exit for that is still alignment with the same blind throng. To be anything but a dead slave requires willingly becoming one.
Jesus tries to warn us. “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” Disciples respond “we are able,” and he concedes: “you will.”8
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
— Romans 6:3-11
If this makes perfect sense to you, you don’t understand it. Paul works doubletime to help us grasp that we cannot grasp anything:
Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations.
— Romans 6:16-19
This willing entering into death causes a radical transformation of our status, “For the one who was a slave when called to faith in the Lord is the Lord’s freed person; similarly, the one who was free when called is Christ’s slave.”9 Ultimately, we are both once we have been buried and resurrected. Both a voluntary slave and truly free—a son and heir of the whole world.10
“People talk about the liberty of the Christian Church, about giving or not giving freedom to Christians. Underlying all these ideas and expressions there is some strange misconception. Freedom cannot be bestowed on or taken from a Christian or Christians. Freedom is an inalienable possession of the Christian.
If we talk about bestowing freedom on Christians or withholding it from them, we are obviously talking not of real Christians but of people who only call themselves Christians. A Christian cannot fail to be free, because the attainment of the aim he sets before himself cannot be prevented or even hindered by anyone or anything.”
— Leo Tolstoy
11What does this have to do with being oneself, being an individual? Because, you see, death is the only way to disentangle yourself from the masses, from collectivities. The mass of mankind is dead and destined for death. As Simone Weil succinctly (and almost correctly) puts it, “Only human beings have an eternal destiny. Human collectivities have not got one.”12 As I have said elsewhere, there is only one exception and it’s not one: the church, an institutional collective which is at the same time a transcendent individual, the body and bride of Christ. When we give up our being an individual and hand it over to the fullness, the body of Christ,13 we gain it back again and God pours out of us, enabling us to act as a true individual not eternally capitulated to the world or its masses.
René Girard comes closer than any other, so far as I know, at putting it into language the world can understand via mimetic theory:
Non-Christians imagine that to be converted they must renounce an autonomy that all people possess naturally, a freedom and independence that Jesus would like to take away from them. In reality, once we imitate Jesus, we discover that our aspiration to autonomy has always made us bow down before individuals who may not be worse than we are but who are nonetheless bad models because we cannot imitate them without falling with them into the trap of rivalries in which we are ensnared more and more.14
How accurately Girard describes the paradox of giving up your autonomy to gain it is unimportant. What I’m getting at is this: you and I have never had an original thought in our lives. We cannot be a “self” on our own.
“Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion.”
— Joseph Conrad
15This was true even before the internet turned the search for truth into swimming up Niagara Falls, true before the church invented propaganda or the state perfected it. Is there a thing of which it can be said, “See, this is new! This has not been done before!”16 Is there one who can say, “This static logic produced by the world is being put to new use! I can fit the Lord’s plans into its molds! I can seize the means of man for the ends of God!”
No! There is only one who can say, “Behold, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I give water in the wilderness, to give drink to my chosen people.”17 God is the only one who can think for himself. He has said it, and he continues to say it: his way has ever been new! It has never been tried wholesale! And the reality is it will not be; it will be relegated to petty radicals until the not-yet.
The world’s wisdom uses logic and reality. Its means are most efficacious. But the antithesis of sin is not the maximizing of virtue or the multiplying of well-being by some utilitarian metric; it is the obedience of faith. The obedience of faith is real freedom, for through it some small part of us deep within has not been coopted by the world but is the presence of the Wholly Other.
“man’s only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place—a much humbler place than we have been taught to think—in the order of creation.”
— Wendell Berry
18Can we drink the cup given to his chosen people?
The pagan prophet Diogenes hit the nail on the head when he said the “way to guarantee freedom is to be ready to die.”19 Freedom is dangerous, but “for freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”20
To exhibit the obedience of faith and thus be free will terrify or disgust the most intelligent in the world. It is offensive. “A self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having.”21 To be oneself is to know that one is only before the One before whom “there is no crowd, only single individuals.”22
One must lose the world to gain it, lose oneself to become such. Absurd! And yet Abraham is a knight of faith23 by renouncing “the universal in order to become the single individual.”24 To go from a dead slave of false masters to a free son of the King, we must eat and drink that which brings death to all we know.
A brief polemical postscript
Why take such an offensive stance? How is this effective at promoting the gospel? On the one hand, this is what I think. In expressing it, I am being myself. But on a more serious note: I can only poorly echo my master, and blessed is the one who is not offended at him.25 Conversely, may whatever is untrue in my words offend you deeply so you are not convinced by foolish talk and blabbering on. As for effectiveness in convincing you—it does not concern me, for it does not seem to concern the God who would turn to a horde of potential followers and tell them exactly what they don’t want to hear.
Stubbornly proclaiming this perspective might not have been necessary when the church was but a despised and persecuted cult, but it is necessary in a world in which Christianity is viewed by both adherents and detractors as “a religion.” It is necessary in a world in which Christianity is popular.
Many modify the Christianity of the Bible to make it less offensive or conversion more effective. “Agreeableness” and “effectiveness” are false gods the world worships with unmatched zeal. How can someone pervert the Bible in their name without being an idolater themselves? Unknowingly, such is the position “of many well-intentioned people, who think they can succeed where Jesus failed and who think the world is getting better…How innocent such people are! Judgement has been rendered once and for all: ‘The Light came into the world, and the world did not receive it.’ There is no use trying again.”26
Nay; eat, drink, and be merry. I eat flesh, I drink blood, I know true freedom.
Opening quote from Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse (Liveright, 2022), pg 90.
Gal 4.
Eph 2, Col 2.
Biblical quotations in ESV unless otherwise noted.
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, pg 87-89.
1 Cor 1.
John 6, my paraphrase.
Mark 10, my paraphrase.
1 Cor 7:22, NIV.
Gal 3-4.
Quote from The Kingdom of God is Within You by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Constance Garnett.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, translated by A.F. Willis (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1953). Also found in pg 88 of Simone Weil: An Anthology by Siân Miles (Grove Press, 1986).
Eph 1-3.
René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, translated by James G. Williams (Orbis Books, 2001), pg 14-15.
Quote from An Outpost of Progress in Joseph Conrad’s Tales of Unrest (1898).
Cf. Ecc 1:10.
Isa 43, my paraphrase.
Quote from A Continuous Harmony by Wendell Berry (1970).
The quote comes to us secondhand through Epictetus in his Discourses.
Gal 5.
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, translated by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1980), pg 33.
Ibid, pg 123. After I wrote this post, I stumbled across a couple of excellent essays about the crowd/the individual with a Kierkegaardian lens: The Crowd and the Anti-Crowd and Christ Contra the Crowd over at Kierkegaardian Reflections.
Heb 11.
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, pg 91.
Matt 11:6.
Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City, translated by Dennis Pardee (Eerdmans, 1970), pg 37.